Aside from check-ups and running errands, the game marked McKenna’s very first outing, a post in the group, Healing For McKenna, detailed.

When another pair of teams took the field, Lee took a break and helped Kassy cover herself with a blanket to breastfeed McKenna. But, with their attention diverted away from the field, the couple didn’t notice when a softball was launched over the fence in their direction.

While the softball hit Kassy in the bicep, the couple wasn’t aware that McKenna was impacted, too — until she started screaming a few seconds later and a large lump formed on her head.

According to the Facebook group, the infant was immediately taken to nearby Waverly Health Center in Waverly, Iowa, and was then flown to St. Mary’s Hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Once in Minnesota, doctors placed McKenna on anti-seizure medications as they treated her for skull fractures and two brain bleeds.

In the hours and days after she was hit, baby McKenna suffered multiple seizures, some lasting almost 10 to 15 minutes long, with many of them coming back-to-back in clusters. McKenna was soon put in a “deep coma” and placed on a ventilator, according to Healing For McKenna.

On May 4, medical personnel performed a CT scan on McKenna and found one of the bleeds in her brain had grown larger. They soon ordered a blood transfusion, an update in the Facebook group said.

Another CT scan over the weekend showed McKenna was stable, but, according to Facebook, doctors remain unsure about any brain damage she could have suffered. The family won’t know the degree of it — or if she even has any damage — until she is further into her recovery. As of Sunday, a post on Healing For McKenna announced she had been seizure free for more than two days.

Lee and Kassy declined to comment when reached by PEOPLE, saying in a statement that they “want to focus our strength and time to the care and comfort of McKenna.”

The family has recently set up a YouCaring donation page to help with McKenna’s medical care. Supporters on the page have already raised some $35,000 of their $50,000 goal as of Tuesday, which the family said will only go toward McKenna’s present and future medical expenses.

A 66-Year-Old Woman's Brain Implant Was Shut Off By a Lightning Strike

A doctor in Slovenia has reported on a case with a lesson you might want to remember. If you wind up with a brain implant at some point down the road—including the kind that might someday allow you to control computers with your mind—be sure you don’t try and charge it during a thunderstorm.

According to the report, published earlier this month and spotted by Ars Technica, a 66-year-old patient with a brain implant was in her apartment when it was struck by lightning. The strike was strong enough to “burn and destroy” electrical appliances in the apartment, including a television and air conditioner.

It was also strong enough to trigger a failsafe that shut off the woman’s brain implant, even though it wasn’t connected to the home’s wiring. The patient was being treated for involuntary neck spasms using a procedure called Deep Brain Stimulation, or DBS. It’s a well-established therapy that has been used for Parkinson’s disease for more than two decades, and was approved to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in 2009. DBS treatment relies on an implant called a neurostimulator, in this case a unit from Medtronic, that sends electrical impulses to electrodes implanted in the brain.

The patient didn’t notice anything was wrong until an hour after the storm, when her spasms returned. She was able to get her implant reactivated and her tremors back under control quickly, and no damage to the implant was found.

But that outcome, according to the reporting doctor, could have been much worse if the implant had been plugged in to recharge during the lightning strike. Though the report doesn’t speculate on just how badly the patient could have been harmed, it does refer to “serious brain injury” in cases where patients with implants were exposed to strong electromagnetic fields. Electrical implants can be shut off or damaged when they get too close to generators, arc welders, or even medical equipment like MRI machines.

A medical neurostimulator isn’t precisely analogous to the kind of brain implants that entrepreneurs including Elon Musk want to develop. In fact, simple brain-computer interfaces have already been shown to work without any implant at all. But more sensitive versions of the technology probably will involve implants, so if you ever decide to literally hack your brain, be careful when you plug it in.

Poison Ivy, Oak and Sumac Rashes Can Be Serious

THURSDAY, April 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Itchy, blistering rashes from poison ivy, oak and sumac are common and are caused by an oil in the plants called urushiol.

Usually, you can deal with these rashes at home, the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) says. But you should go to the emergency room immediately if you have any of the following symptoms:

Trouble breathing or swallowing,

The rash covers most of your body, you have many rashes or blisters, or the rash develops anywhere on your face or genitals,

You develop swelling, especially if an eyelid swells shut,

Much of your skin itches, or nothing eases the itch.

If you don't have any of these symptoms, you can probably treat the rash at home, according to the AAD.

If you know you've touched poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac, immediately rinse your skin with lukewarm, soapy water. This may remove some of the oil from the plants. Thoroughly wash all the clothes you were wearing when you came into contact with plant. The oil can stick to clothing and cause another rash if contaminated clothing touches your skin.

You also need to use warm, soapy water to wash everything that might have the oil on its surface, such as gardening tools, golf clubs, leashes and even your pet's fur.

Avoid scratching, which can cause an infection. And, leave blisters alone. Taking short, lukewarm baths with an oatmeal preparation you can buy at a drugstore, or with one cup of baking soda added to the water, can help ease itching. Short, cool showers may also help.

Other ways to relieve itching include putting calamine lotion or hydrocortisone cream on your skin. Applying cool compresses may also help ease itching. Make a cool compress by wetting a clean washcloth with cold water and wringing it out so that it does not drip.

Antihistamine pills can also reduce itching, but use them with caution, the AAD noted. Do not apply antihistamines to the skin. Doing so could worsen the rash and itch, the AAD said.

See a doctor if the rash does not improve within seven to 10 days, or if you think you may have an infection.

7 Questions To Ask Your Employer About Wellness Privacy

If your company hasn’t launched a wellness program, this might be the year.

As benefits enrollment for 2016 approaches, more employers than ever are expected to nudge workers toward plans that screen them for risks, monitor their activity and encourage them to take the right pills, food and exercise.

This involves a huge collection of health data outside the established medical system, not only by wellness vendors such as Redbrick, Audax and Vitality but also by companies offering gym services, smartphone apps and devices that track steps and heartbeats. Such partners pass worker results to the wellness providers.

Standards to keep such information confidential have developed more slowly than the industry. That raises risks it could be abused for workplace discrimination, credit screening or marketing, consumer advocates say.

Here’s what to ask about your company’s plan.

Q. What information will my employer see?

Many employers get only anonymous, group data. The vendor reports how many workers are overweight or have high blood pressure, for example.

But sometimes employers can see individual results, setting the stage for potential discrimination against those with disabilities or chronic illness. Or they can guess them. Discrimination based on disability and illness is illegal but hard to prove.

Workers should ask exactly what information will get back to their company and whether it will identify them.

Q. Is the program covered under the HIPAA privacy law?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act restricts sharing of certain medical information to doctors, health insurers and other authorized users. Asking whether a wellness plan is covered by HIPAA is a good, first attempt at judging confidentiality.

Workplace wellness programs offered separately from an employer’s group health insurance plan are not protected by HIPAA. Other privacy laws might apply. But often it’s often impossible for employees to tell without asking.

Even in HIPAA-covered programs, a few, designated managers at your workplace can see health reports including identities, although they’re supposed to keep them confidential.

Q. I don’t understand the privacy policy. Did I give up my HIPAA rightswhen I filled out my health assessment on the wellness site?

Use of a wellness portal often gives the vendor permission to share personal data with unidentified “third parties.” Those would be insurers, data-storage firms and other partners necessary to the program, vendors say. They’ll protect the information as well as anybody, they say.

But the open-ended nature of the permission gives consumer advocates the creeps. Read the privacy and terms-of-use disclosures. Ask questions if you’re uncomfortable.

Q. My employer says it sees only group results. Does that guarantee privacy?

At smaller firms it’s sometimes easy for managers to match worker identities with results from group reports. The same goes for large companies when wellness data is disclosed by team or division.

Your Sleep Tracker Probably Isn’t Very Good at Tracking Your Sleep

Jawbones and Fitbits are fine, but there are still some health insights that your own brain figures out better. Like this one: How did you sleep last night? In a recent Reddit AMA, Ying-Hui Fui, a sleep scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, explained that while wearables do a good job of measuring movement and heart rate while you sleep, they aren't going to provide an accurate picture of the quality of your night's rest.

"To really know the quality of sleep, we have to be able to measure EEG during sleep," said Fui, meaning the brain's electrical activity. "Most EEG devices are difficult to use and expensive." In other words, they don't retail for $99 and clip neatly to your clothing. The best way to track your own sleep, then, is the old-fashioned way, Fui said. More on that:

I think that right now, the best way is still to listen to your body and figure out what is the best schedule and duration for yourself. For example, when you are on vacation and have no social responsibilities and no other external influences, what is your body telling you to do and how do you feel? What makes you feel the best most of the day? Although it sounds primitive, it's still the most accurate way. You can use fitbit or whatever to measure your sleep duration, but if you don't feel good, it still has no benefit to help you with your sleep.

Are You an Introvert — Or Are You Maybe an Undercover Narcissist?

Something introverts really like to do, it seems, is read and talk about their own introversion. A commenter on a recent Science of Us post on the four kinds of introversion summed matters up quite nicely: "Gosh, introverts are just so FASCINATING! — Introverts." This tendency, you could argue, may arise simply because introverts like spending a lot of time in deep reflection, getting lost in their own thoughts — and some of those thoughts, naturally, are going to be about themselves.

But at what point does self-reflection cross the line into self-preoccupation? As it turns out, there are some striking similarities between the popular understanding of introversion and a psychological characteristic called covert narcissism: It's all the entitlement and grandiosity most people associate with narcissism, minus the bluster. Maybe you know someone like this: They tend to believe they're being underestimated or overlooked, like their amazing qualities are forever going unnoticed by everyone else. They often take things too personally, especially criticism, and sometimes feel a little resentful when other people bother them with their problems.

Take a look at some of the items on a scale to measure covert narcissism, designed by psychologist Jonathan Cheek:

I easily become wrapped up in my own interests and forget the existence of others. I feel that I am temperamentally different from most people. When I enter a room, I often become self-conscious and feel that the eyes of others are upon me.
Of that last one, Cheek quipped to me: "Who are you, who everybody's looking at you? That's a narcissistic fantasy. It's assuming that the world is paying a lot of attention to you." (Scroll down to the bottom of this post, by the way, if you'd like to see how you rank on Cheek's quiz.) Taken together, many of the items on Cheek's scale sound an awful lot like the way most people understand introversion, and that's no coincidence. Covert narcissism correlates strongly with introversion, Cheek explained — if you have one, you're more likely to have the other, though there are plenty of introverts who don't also have narcissistic tendencies. "Covert narcissism is sort of a dark side of introversion," he said. "Just like overt narcissism is kind of a dark side of extroversion." Put another way: Not all introverts are covert narcissists — but covert narcissists are almost certainly introverts.

Covert narcissism is called many names in the scientific literature: closet narcissism, hypersensitive narcissism, and vulnerable narcissism, to name a few. Here, I'll mostly be using the term covert narcissism, and its opposite — overt narcissism, which is the usual way we think of narcissism: that is to say, as Trump-ish. But whatever you want to call it, it's not by any means a new insight into human behavior, even though it's still not very widely known outside of academia. As far back as the late 1930s, researchers published their observations of this quieter form of narcissism, according to the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, who once wrote about the subject for Scientific American. The University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Paul Wink addressed the "two faces of narcissism" again in the early 1990s, and later that decade, Cheek published the first version of his scale.

But covert narcissism is understudied in comparison to its louder sibling, mostly because the trait is a tricky one to observe in human nature, let alone in a laboratory setting, explained W. Keith Campbell, a psychologist at the University of Georgia. "It's not somebody with a big personality," Campbell said. "It's somebody who's a little paranoid, who thinks they're not being treated fairly. They're a little suspicious, entitled." (When he does presentations on the subject, the pop-culture figure who often pops up on his slides to illustrate the vulnerable narcissist is George Costanza.)

Because the trait is so closely associated with introversion, there are few outward signs of this version of narcissism — instead of bragging aloud, for example, covert narcissists mostly keep their sky-high opinions of themselves locked inside their own heads, leaving them feeling misunderstood and overlooked. Zooey Deschanel, for example may or may not be an introvert and she may or may not be a narcissist, but back in 2012 she gave an interview to Allure that includes a quote about her college experience, and it's a pretty great articulation of this state of mind. "I went to Northwestern because I had gone to a really nontraditional high school. I was like, 'It'd be cool to have a traditional college experience,'" she told the magazine. "Then I was like, 'Oh, but none of these people understand what's cool about me. My specialness is not appreciated in this place.'"

Some psychologists, however, argue that all narcissists are, in reality, quite vulnerable or even needy, despite their outward boastfulness. "There are covert narcissist aspects to any kind of narcissist," said Craig Malkin, author of the new book Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad — and Surprising Good — About Feeling Special. "It's just a mess with all these different terms. At the common core, these are people who are addicted to feeling special. It's just that there are a lot of ways to do it." Others say that covert narcissism might not really be narcissism at all, but instead a form of neuroticism. (And in either case, by the way, we're talking here about trait narcissism, which is different from the personality disorder listed in the DSM-V. Many people's personalities would rate somewhere on the narcissistic spectrum; it's when the narcissism begins to intrude negatively into their lives, causing serious problems at work or home, that it starts to stray into disorder territory.)

Cheek, incidentally, recently completed some new research on the "common core" that unites both forms of the trait, which he presented earlier this year at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In a study of more than 600 people, he found that both introverted and extroverted narcissists have two things in common: A sense of entitlement and fantasies of their own grandiosity. "You have to have a pretty grand sense of yourself, but you also have to feel like you are entitled to have that recognized by other people," Cheek said. "If you're overt, you're out there fighting for that recognition. But if you're covert, you're left in this kind of strange, introverted state, where you're having these thoughts like, I wonder why people aren't more appreciative of my good qualities. Nobody else seems to understand me."

Overt narcissism carries with it some good qualities — these sorts of people, for example, tend to make excellent leaders. On the other hand, "I can't see a lot of upsides to vulnerable narcissism," Campbell said. If you're seeing some of yourself in the definition of this kind of undercover egotism (and you would, you narcissist), there are some ways to tamp down the tendencies. "Practice caring and compassion for others," Campbell said. "Do things you are passionate about rather than make you look good, and take responsibility for your actions. Basically, practices that minimize the ego and increase connection with the world." Bonus: If you're the type of introvert who is prone to social anxiety, turning your attention outside of yourself has been shown to reduce those jittery feelings. Life gets easier — for any personality type — when you remind yourself every once in a while that it's not all about you.

You can take our quiz, adapted with permission from Cheek's ten-item scale, to see whether or not you are a covert narcissist.

A Core-Strengthening Yoga Sequence

In this tutorial, John Campbell, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and a longtime Ashtanga yoga teacher and practitioner, presents a traditional yoga practice that will help you develop a strong core. The key to this sequence is to focus on balancing the breath, flexibility, and stability in order to create a greater level of strength and well-being. Listen as Campbell explains why yoga practice provides an excellent pathway to a strong and balanced body.

What Drives Trophy Hunters Like Walter Palmer?

When this week began, chances are high that you’d never heard of Cecil the lion, the beloved big cat of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. But by now, you’ve likely heard of his death. Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, paid about $55,000 for the (illegal) privilege of lion-hunting — though, after two days of tracking Cecil, it in the end wasn’t much of a hunt: Palmer and his guides reportedly used bait to lure the 13-year-old lion a half-mile outside of the protected park area. There, Palmer shot the animal with a bow and arrow, inflicting a severe wound that would lead to the animal’s death. The New York Times reports that Palmer had planned to mount Cecil’s head upon returning home.

Palmer has since expressed his regret over killing Cecil, claiming in a statement to the Star-Tribune on Tuesday that he did not realize that what he had done was not legal, or that Cecil was a famous and well-loved lion, or that the animal was the subject of an ongoing research project with Oxford University. But his words suggest that if Cecil hadn’t been famous, Palmer would regret nothing. He is, after all, a member of Safari Club International, a nonprofit “hunters’ rights” organization; the Safari Club website has a list of Palmer’s 43 kills, which include, among other things, a polar bear.

The question, then, is why? What motivates Palmer and other trophy hunters, as they’re called, to fly thousands of miles and spend tens of thousands of dollars, all for the sake of killing an animal like Cecil? The answer is complex, but, largely, it can be thought of as a demonstration of power and prestige, says Amy Fitzgerald, a sociologist at the University of Windsor.

In 2003, Fitzgerald and Linda Kalof of Michigan State published research in the sociology journal Visual Studies in which they analyzed 792 “hero shots” — the post-kill photo of hunter and prey — published in 14 popular hunting magazines. Most of the shots, Fitzgerald recalls, seemed to be arranged to show the hunter’s dominance over the animal. “The hunter tended to be pictured above standing or sitting above the animals, which clearly demonstrated the power dynamic that was going on there,” Fitzgerald said. In the vast majority of photos she and Kalof examined, the animal had been cleaned up, blood scrubbed away and wounds carefully hidden from view, making the animal look almost alive — as if the hunter had somehow tamed this giant, wild creature into submission. “It seems like, with the large animals, they were positioning them as though they were alive as a way to confirm the contest that had gone on — that this was a large virile animal that had to be taken down,” Fitzgerald said.

Photo: Courtesy of Science of Us

A show of power via dominance over the animal kingdom is, of course, nothing new. “This is something that goes back to antiquity, when kings had fake hunts with captured lions released just to be shot from a chariot by the waiting king,” Kalof said in an email to Science of Us. These “hunts” were done in front of an audience, which was a way of publicly declaring and validating the king’s power, Kalof noted, adding that “the trophy hunt of today is similarly a display of power and control by wealthy men.” Indeed, what Kalof describes sounds similar to today’s so-called “canned hunting,” which takes place in an enclosed area in order to increase the likelihood that some rich — and, often, American — tourist will nab a kill. (Noted fans of the canned hunt include Donald Trump’s two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.)

Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon and notes that, both in cultures where hunting is necessary for survival and in those where it is not, the skill certainly attracts attention, though for wildly different reasons. “There’s the element of conspicuous consumption,” Gurven said. “I study people who hunt for food because they have no other choice. And here is someone paying $50,000 — which, as an annual income, that would be well above the poverty line — to have the opportunity to put himself in potential danger in order to kill a lion.”

Another huge part of the draw for trophy hunters, of course, is the thrill, or the element of danger. But in Palmer’s specific case, this, too, ties back to the wealth element, Gurven argued. “When you’re paying $55,000 for something, it’s probably a sign that — if it’s not necessarily illegal, certainly the animal you’re hunting is rare,” Gurven said. “If you think about the danger of the actual hunt — sure, the animal itself is dangerous.” But with Cecil, at least, the lion’s familiarity with humans likely made him an easy target, Louis Muller, chairman of Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association, told the Telegraph. “But the potential illegality of it — I think that makes it dangerous for a different reason,” Gurven said. “How do you smuggle the head or whatever he was going to take back to the U.S.? Getting that animal head on the wall is another signal of strength.” (Of course, there are plenty of trophy hunters who pursue the sport they love legally — he’s not talking about them here, just this one specific case of the lion and the dentist.)

The argument trophy hunters themselves often give is that killing the animals is an unlikely act of charity, and that the massive amounts of money tourists fork over helps to fund conservation efforts. Cecil’s death has reignited debate over that argument, but some major mainstream organizations have previously backed it, including the World Wildlife Fund. In a 2009 profile of Palmer in the New York Times, the curator of a bow-hunting club called Pope and Young explains that, yes, part of the draw is the “personal achievement” factor. But there’s another part to it, Glen Hisey explained. “It is a way of honoring that animal for all time,” he told the Times. Put differently, it’s a way of immersing yourself in nature in a way that modern life doesn’t always allow. As the conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold once noted (as quoted in the magazine Montana Outdoors), “Poets sing and hunters scale the mountains primarily for one and the same reason — the thrill to beauty. Critics write and hunters outwit their game for one and the same reason — to reduce that beauty to possession.”

How Your Feet Can Help You Sleep

https://youtu.be/tt247mla-ko
If you have trouble sleeping, you already know the basics: Avoid late-day caffeine, shut off the smartphone or laptop well before bedtime, keep your bedroom dark and cool — that kind of thing. But there's something you likely haven't tried, mostly because it is, frankly, a little weird. Next time you're lying awake at night, try sticking one or both feet out from under your covers. No, really — it works! It helps lower your internal temperature, which signals to your body that it's time to drift off to sleep. In the first episode of the new Science of Us video series, we explore the biology behind this unlikely sleep tip. Check it out, and come back next week for the second installment of our animated videos!

The Career Mistake You Don’t Realize You’re Making

Your colleagues and bosses might think of you as the office chatterbox.

When you’ve got the floor in a meeting, do you notice people looking at the clock or their phones?

When you’re chatting over the water cooler, do you find yourself chiming in before your colleagues finish their sentences?

Do you typically go off on tangents when you tell a story?

Do people nod blankly and say “uh huh” a lot when you’re speaking?

Do you notice that people at work prefer to communicate with you via email?

You may be an overtalker.

Most people who talk too much don’t realize they do it, says Annie Stevens, managing partner for ClearRock, a leadership development and executive coaching firm. No matter whether it’s fueled by insecurity or overconfidence, however, this quality can be deadly to one’s career—especially these days.

How Talking Too Much Can Hurt You

With 67% of people working “a great deal more” than they did five years ago, according to a survey by staffing firm Manpower, workers literally have less patience for distractions. “No one has time to sit down for an hour to get an answer to a question,” says Stevens. Your peers and supervisors may start avoiding you if you are sucking up a lot of their time.

Additionally, if you can’t get to the point in a meeting, your boss may wonder about your ability to communicate with higher ups or clients. Prattling on in an interview could obscure the points that you’re trying to make, and hamper your chances at getting the job.

Women seem to pay a bigger price for being loquacious. A Yale University study found that high-level women who talk more at work are perceived as less competent than men. According to lead researcher Victoria Brescoll, people tend to want to reward males who are garrulous by either by hiring them or giving them more responsibility, while females who talk a lot are seen as domineering and presumptuous.

For any worker, though, the ability to share information clearly and succinctly is an asset, says Stevens. In a world where big ideas can be conveyed in under 140 characters, there’s less tolerance for a verbal opus.

Stevens’s motto: “Be brief, be brilliant, be gone.”

Keep from Being Seen as a Blabbermouth

Become self aware. Watch for those red flags mentioned above. The surest sign of them that you’re talking too much is that you talk over someone who is speaking. “It can be a fatal error if it happens during a job interview, a career killer if done often with your boss, and will alienate co-workers if you’re repeatedly interrupting and hijacking the conversation,” said Stevens.

Strive to pay attention—at least for a few days—to other people’s reactions when you’re talking. Do your colleagues, for example, join in the digression when you veer off topic? You’re probably in the clear.

Pay attention to body language, too. You are likely losing your listener if he or she glances at a clock or a computer, stops making eye contact or is no longer taking notes. “Wrap up as soon as you can,” says Stevens.

Have a script. There are times when you do need to talk about yourself. Develop and memorize a 90-second verbal response so you are prepared with a summary when interviewers or networking contacts say, “Tell me about yourself.”

Similarly, if you’re giving a speech or presentation, outline a few key points before the meeting and stick to them. Watch for those cues noted above as signs you should get back on track.

Details are important in storytelling, but make sure you’re pared down to the essentials. “The annoying companion of over-talking is over-telling, as in disclosing too many, too personal, irrelevant and or inappropriate details,” says Stevens.

Practice active listening. Don’t just be lying in conversational wait for your turn to talk. Pay close attention to what is being discussed and ask relevant follow up questions.

Showing your listening skills can be just as important as showing how much you can talk, says Stevens. “If the vperson you are speaking with believes that you’re interested in what they’re saying, he or she will think positively about you.”

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